Court can fix injustice of Citizens United

"The U.S. Supreme Court undermined our democracy in 'Citizens United.' The Montana case gives it an opportunity to revisit that decision."

Thus did the Brennan Center for Justice conclude the brief it has filed with the Supreme Court, which is considering Montana's 100-year-old ban on corporate campaign contributions. We couldn't have said it any better.

In its Citizens United ruling, the court said corporations and unions had a constitutional right to spend as much as they wished on "independent" political efforts. While this is in theory even-handed, in fact corporations have far more money than unions, and they tend to spend it to support Republicans.

The case was decided at the start of 2010, and it didn't take long for its effects to be felt. The "super" political action committees unleashed by the ruling spent $83.7 that year on electioneering, according to the Washington Post.

This year, the deluge. As of May 8, super PACs have raised more than $204 million and spent more than $98.8 million, the Brennan Center said. "In total, outside groups have already spent roughly $121.2 million on federal campaigns, double the amount spent in the same period in 2008."

As disturbing as the total is the fact that so much of this money came from a relatively few wealthy individuals. "More than half of the money collected by super PACs since the beginning of 2011 - almost $110 million - came from donors giving $1 million or more," the Brennan Center said.

This means a relative handful of people can exert a massive impact on the 2012 elections.

We know here in Western North Carolina how that can work. Last-minute attack ads and mailers from two organizations dominated by one man, Art Pope, were considered by many to be largely responsible for the defeat of state Sen. John Snow, of Murphy, in 2010.

The state of Montana has given the Supreme Court a chance to mend its ways. Montana's voters in 1912 enacted a ban on corporate campaign contributions to keep copper companies from controlling state government. It would appear Citizens United has wiped that law off the books.

But Montana has stood firm. Its Supreme Court rebuffed a challenge from Western Tradition Partnership, an anti-environmental group which then took its case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Citizens United decision is simply terrible. The court ignored its own precedents and went far beyond the case at hand to make a constitutional ruling.

All the plaintiffs had asked was to be allowed to broadcast an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary. They claimed federal prohibitions covered only commercials, not documentaries.

But, as Jeffrey Toobin recounted in The New Yorker, conservative activists on the court saw their chance to gut the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law and overturn decisions upholding parts of it. While Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts maneuvered to assure the outcome, Toobin wrote.

Precedents should not be sacrosanct. The Dred Scott decision denying that slaves were persons and the Plessy decision upholding racial segregation were precedents that richly deserved to be overturned. The Supreme Court went far beyond the case at hand when it outlawed school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education.

But the decisions are otherwise in sharp contrast. Brown brought the nation closer to equality for all while Citizens United moved it further from that goal.

In the Citizens United ruling, the court said, based on the facts presented, that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

The Brennan Center has presented facts that lead to the opposite conclusion.